Positive Tales

Extract from: A Vegetable called Cheryl! - by Cheryl Priestly
I am eighteen, I live on Coffee Hall. My earliest memory was when I was four. The doctor said to my Mum that I was going to be a cabbage in a wheelchair. I couldn't talk. That is my memory. I have been told I am not a cerebral palsy - I am a cerebral palsy victim, because I do a lot of things which people with cerebral palsy tend not to do. My Mum taught me to talk. When I was seven I said my first word. My first word was Mum.

I have eleven aunts. My Mum comes from a place up in Scotland, Aberdeen. I was born in Aylesbury, Bucks. My Dad was in the Forces and that's where my Mum met my Dad, because my Mum was in the Forces too. I don't have brothers or sisters, I was a only child.

The doctors told my Mum to put me in a home for mentally retarded people, but my Mum knew there was something there, so my Mum kept fighting the doctors. My Mum was nineteen when she had me. When my Mum had me, my real Dad thought I was his little golden girl. He liked to take me around to see his army friends.

My Mum was on leave in England to see my Grandma. She was six months pregnant. I was born three months premature. I was the size of a hand. My Mum could put me in her hand, I was that tiny. I was not the right size of a normal baby so Jimmy Saville arranged to buy me an incubator. I was so tiny, I used to go in a machine with red lights shining down on me so I would think I was still inside my Mum.

In the end my Mum took me to Cyprus. When I was four months old I got really hot, burning up, my temperature was 102F and they put me in packs of ice, they packed me in ice but they couldn't get my temperature down, so they called an army doctor. He gave me a lumbar puncture, but I was a premature baby, I was very tiny, he took too much fluid out of the back of my spine and the next day I couldn't lift my head like a normal baby. My Mum said, "What have you done to my baby." My Mum was in tears. All my muscles had seized up. If the doctor hadn't done that I wouldn't be alive, but he made me disabled.

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Rebus & PCS symbols used with kind permission from Widgit Software Ltd Tel (+44) 01926 885303

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